Nokia is tapping into the collective wisdom of mobile technology enthusiasts on the Internet as it designs a new smartphone concept device. The handset maker has launched a new project called Design by Community which aims to collect feedback about preferred device characteristics from visitors to the Nokia Conversations blog.

The website has a set of sliders that can be used to select a desired phone configuration within certain parameters. When the user has selected their optimal configuration, they can click a “submit” button to send their choices to Nokia. The company will tabulate the results and use the information to design the new device concept. There will be several rounds during which a separate set of parameters will be put up for voting.
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Google is continuing its quiet war on Microsoft Office by making it easier for users to switch from Exchange to Google Apps for e-mail. The company has launched a new server-side tool called Google Apps Migration for Microsoft® Exchange, which not only migrates your company e-mail, but also moves your calendar and contact info into the cloud.

According to Google’s Enterprise Blog, the migration is only four steps long and works quickly to bring in the information that you choose. There’s even the option to import the data in phases, which makes life easier if there’s too much to bring in at any one time. The tool works with both hosted and on-premise Microsoft Exchange 2003 or 2007 and is free to those who already subscribe to Google Apps Premier and Education edition.
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Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Phone 7 Series shares one trait in common with Apple’s iPhone: It doesn’t support full multitasking.

While the iPhone does allow some limited multitasking (the phone and iPod apps can run in the background) many critics have knocked the iPhone for its inability to run third-party apps in the background. If you want to write an e-mail while listening to music in the Pandora app, for example, you must first quit Pandora. The only way to enable full background processing on an iPhone is to jailbreak (i.e., hack) the device.
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Ready for another long, drawn-out copy and paste controversy to overtake your every waking moment for a year or two? Good: Microsoft just mentioned in a Q&A session here at MIX10 in no uncertain terms that clipboard operations won’t be supported on Windows Phone 7 Series…

so that’s that. Kind of ironic considering that the WinMo of old has been enjoying the functionality since time immemorial, isn’t it? Of course, anything is possible going forward — they’ve said on several occasions in different talks and sessions this week that they’re already looking at a number of enhancements that were scoped out of the initial release of the platform — but for the phones you buy this holiday season, don’t expect to be copying anything between apps.